What if?: Creative pedagogy for diverse classrooms

    Activity: Talk or presentationPresentation

    Description

    I tried to chirp for help Sa3douni, Sa3douni (help me, help me) Yet everyone was caught up in their conversations In a language I couldn’t understand (A.N Year 8) ‘What if we encourage EAL/D students to use all their languages when learning in English?’ As the student who wrote the above poem so poignantly reminds us, many students experience challenges in English classrooms that prioritise monolingual practices, and where teachers’ use of engaging, inclusive pedagogy is often diminished in response to high stakes testing pressures (Berliner, 2011; Dutton & Rushton, 2018b). In this interactive workshop we will showcase creative strategies from our ‘Identity Texts Project’ that develop students’ linguistic and cultural resources and help them represent their languages and identity. These will include: the use of home language(s) and English (translanguaging) in crafting poetry and readers’ theatre, language mapping, and examples from a connected curriculum initiative involving English, Music and Art teachers. All strategies lead to the creation of identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011) that draw on students’ background stories and shape connections with their community. By employing these creative strategies in the translanguaging space (Li Wei, 2014), we can acknowledge students’ diverse backgrounds, and honour the communities, languages and identity of all students.
    Period7 Jul 2020
    Event title AATE/IFTE 'IF' 2020 Conference: Inventing futures, ideas in flight, implementing frameworks
    Event typeConference
    LocationSydney, Australia, New South WalesShow on map
    Degree of RecognitionInternational